James Sanders, the author of Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race and Class in 19th-Century Colombia, teaches history at Utah State University.
Between 1946 and 1964, a period known as La Violencia in Colombia, a proxy war between mostly peasant partisans of the Liberal and Conservative Parties resulted in so many deaths that, in order for terror to have any effect, ever more sadistic methods of torture had to be dreamed up. In the mountains and hot valleys west of Bogotá, new styles of mutilation entered the argot: the...
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